Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca - Strand Mag by The Strand Magazine by Charles L.P. Silet Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” The opening line to Daphne du Maurier’s most famous novel, Rebecca is one of the great opening lines in English fiction. In one stroke, du Maurier establishes the voice, the locale, and the dream-like atmosphere of the story. It’s not surprising that Alfred Hitchcock used the same opening line for his celebrated cinematic adaptation of the novel—one which many critics feel is among his most accomplished. Although Daphne du Maurier was one of the most popular authors of her day and wrote or edited dozens of books—biographies, plays, and collections of letters as well as works of fiction— she is best remembered today for only a handful of novels including, of course, Rebecca. Daphne du Maurier was born on May 13, 1907 in London to Muriel Beaumont, an actress, and Gerald du Maurier, an actor and theatrical manager. Gerald’s father, George, was a famous illustrator, especially known for his work in the British humor magazine Punch.

He was also the author of three best-selling novels: Peter Ibbetson, Trilby (with its famous character Svengali), and The Martins. The du Mauriers were well-established in the artistic world, so Daphne—the middle child of three girls—grew up in a privileged and slightly bohemian environment, one in which she met the famous of the London stage as well as the popular writers of the day. Daphne received the usual haphazard education of young women of her class and time. However, she read voraciously, especially in the standard British classics. After finishing at a school near Paris, she moved into the family home, Ferryside, in the harbor town of Fowey on the Cornish coast. Later she rented a local estate, Menabilly, located nearby, which became one of the models for Manderley. For most of her adult life she resided primarily in the area around Fowey (except when she left to travel with her husband, F.A.M. (Boy) Browning, who was a professional soldier) and set a number of her novels, including Rebecca, in that area.

Du Maurier was blessed with an active imagination and made up stories to act out with her two sisters as they were growing up. Often based on the fiction she was reading, these stories of adventure and romance set the tone for her later best-selling fiction. She began writing short stories in the late 1920s. Her first publication, “And Now to God the Father,” appeared in the May 8th issue of The Bystander, edited by her uncle Willie Beaumont, her mother’s brother. As she later would write in her autobiography, Myself When Young (1977), “I went self-consciously into the W.H. Smith’s [the booksellers] in Fowey and bought a copy, hoping the girl behind the counter did not know why I was getting it.” Du Maurier’s self-effacing reaction to her first publication was characteristic of her response to her later fame as well. She remained leery of self-promotion and publicity throughout her professional life. Although she sold a number of other short stories to The Bystander, she quickly realized that if she was going to reach financial independence as a writer, she would have to turn her hand to longer works.

During the autumn of 1929 she began her first novel, The Loving Spirit, which became the first of her many books inspired by her life in Cornwall. In The Loving Spirit, du Maurier first put to use the combination of romance, adventure, history, and a sense of atmosphere that would characterize all of her later fiction. It was a winning combination. Over the next fifty years she turned out a couple of dozen books, half of which—and the most memorable—were set in Cornwall. One of the most famous, Jamaica Inn, was suggested in part by a stay in the old coaching inn, long associated in local history with the Cornwall smuggling trade. Although her first novels, The Loving Spirit (1931), I’ll Never Be Young Again (1932), The Progress of Julius (1933), and Jamaica Inn (1936), sold well and established her as an author in Great Britain, it was the publication of Rebecca in 1938 that brought Daphne du Maurier international recognition. The story of Rebecca is probably as well-known today for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 film (with Laurence Olivier as Max de Winter and Joan Fontaine as the second Mrs.

de Winter) as it is for du Maurier’s novel. With an outstanding supporting cast (consisting of Judith Anderson, George Sanders, Nigel Bruce, Reginald Denny, C. Aubrey Smith, Leo G. Carroll, and du Maurier’s old family friend Gladys Cooper) the film remains a true classic. However, the popularity of Hitchcock’s film was originally built on the fame of the best-selling novel, which remains in print some sixty years after its publication. Hitchcock and du Maurier proved a durable film/fiction combination. While still working in Great Britain, Hitchcock filmed a version of Jamaica Inn (1939) with Charles Laughton and Maureen O’Hara and his 1963 film, The Birds, was also based on a du Maurier short story. The novel Rebecca is a curious hybrid—a mixture of romance, murder mystery, and the gothic. The romance, of course, was brought to life by Hitchcock and Hollywood through Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier, but it is at the core of the novel as well.

A naive young woman—interestingly never named in either the novel or the film—is alone in the world (a paid companion to an older, coarser, social-climbing woman) until she meets the handsome, wealthy, and recently widowed Maxim de Winter. He had been married, we are told early on, to the accomplished, beautiful Rebecca who tragically died in a boating accident off the south coast of Cornwall near the de Winter family estate of Manderley. An older, distraught wealthy man meets a younger, callow impoverished woman whom he decides to marry in order to restore his mental health—the plot is common to any number of traditional English romantic novels, most obviously Jane Eyre. The mystery evolves slowly and involves the death of Rebecca around which du Maurier deftly creates a plot twist. Up to the time of the accidental discovery of Rebecca’s body, both the reader and the heroine have been led to believe that Maxim still loves his first wife. However, at this point in the novel Maxim reveals that he had never loved Rebecca, that in fact he had despised her, eventually developing toward her a loathing so powerful that it had led him to kill her. In the film version, Rebecca’s death is portrayed as accidental.

The gothic elements revolve around the house itself—Manderley—and its menacing housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, one of the eeriest figures in fiction who, in her own particular way, terrorizes her new mistress. Although du Maurier forgoes the usual trappings of gothic writing—hidden staircases, floating ghosts, and the like—the atmosphere of the house is so pervaded by the memory of Rebecca that the marriage of the romantic couple is nearly destroyed and the young bride, believing her marriage a failure, nearly commits suicide—with the encouragement of Mrs. Danvers. It is Mrs. Danvers who destroys Manderley in the end by setting it on fire before disappearing from the novel. In the Hollywood version, she is destroyed along with the house which she has set ablaze. Despite the fact that the film is fairly true to du Maurier’s original, there are other significant differences which affect the tone as well, such as those between the respective closing scenes. At the film’s conclusion, Maxim and his wife meet during the burning of Manderley and embrace in front of the flames of the house, a typical Hollywood happy ending.

In the novel, however, after the destruction of Manderley, Maxim and his wife are described as living in self-imposed exile somewhere on the European continent. There they lead a quiet, placid life, skirting carefully around subjects that might rekindle memories of Rebecca and Manderley and “that sense of fear, of furtive unrest.” The ending of the book, therefore, is much darker than that of the film. By the end of the novel, the dream-like opening has taken on a more nightmarish quality, one that more accurately reflects the way the past still haunts the lives of Maxim and his second wife. Du Maurier’s fiction was a durable source for Hollywood movies. Besides those made by Hitchcock, My Cousin Rachel (1952), directed by Henry Koster and starring Olivia de Havilland and a young Richard Burton in his American debut, proved a successful adaptation of du Maurier’s novel of the same name. In 1959, The Scapegoat was made into a film with Alec Guiness and Bette Davis.

Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973), with Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland, also effectively captured her occult short story on film. With their strong psychological plots and emphasis on atmosphere, du Maurier’s novels and stories lent themselves easily to film and through the years the films based on her fiction increased the popularity of her work and enlarged her fame. Daphne du Maurier continued actively writing for almost forty years after she wrote Rebecca, and indeed most of her work appeared after the war. In 1969 she was made a Dame Commander, Order of the British Empire, and in the same year she finally left her beloved Menabilly. In 1977 she was awarded the Grand Master Award by the Mystery Writers of America, and in 1982 she published her last books, The Rendezvous and Other Stories and, appropriately enough, The Rebecca Notebook and Other Memories. She died in1989 in Cornwall at the age of 82.

Throughout her life the fame of Rebecca, both in print and in film, provided her with a constant bond to the past The End Reply I have never ever read a book like Rebecca, which I have read and reread as many times I cannot even remember to count. Whenever I search my book collection for something to read it is without failure Rebecca I chance to reread once more. The mystery, the passion, the longing and just the storyline does something to my mind and intellect which I am not able to put in words. The author, has an air of mystery and emotion that almost makes me feel as if I am her re-incarnated. I look at her face when young and when old and cannot but have an uncanny feeling of “This me!” Words fail me to say anything more.

Leave a Reply The real ghost of Manderley - Telegraph The real ghost of Manderley House of secrets: Daphne du Maurier on the staircase at Menabilly Family affairs: Du Maurier with Browning and their three children By Justine Picardie 12:01AM GMT 24 Feb 2008 A troubled marriage, illicit loves, a spooky Cornish house?… Daphne du Maurier's life had all the ingredients of one of her own stories. Which is why Justine Picardie used her as the inspiration for her own latest novel. Here she attempts to unravel du Maurier's tangled affairs, while we present an exclusive extract from 'Daphne' Extract from 'Daphne' by Justine Picardie 'Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.' Daphne du Maurier's famous opening line of Rebecca - one of the most memorable first sentences ever published - appears to beckon the reader through a padlocked iron gate and down a long, serpentine drive to a hidden mansion, a house of secrets and dreams.

When du Maurier wrote those words, she was far away from her beloved Cornwall, exiled to a foreign country, like her nameless narrator. 'I was 30 years old when I began the story,' she wrote, more than four decades later, 'in the fall of 1937 [when] my soldier husband, Boy Browning, was commanding officer of the Second Battalion, Grenadier Guards, which was stationed in Alexandria, and I was with him. We had left our two small daughters, the youngest still a baby, back in England in the care of their nanny…' Yet in an odd twist of homesickness, what she missed most was not her children, but an abandoned house - Menabilly, which she had fallen in love with long before her marriage, dreaming of rescuing it from ruin - and it was this that she summoned up as the mysterious Manderley. Manderley, like its inhabitant, Rebecca - a ghost as alive as the house itself - was at the heart of what became an enormously successful novel which was subsequently adapted into a Hitchcock film in 1940.

And it was with the proceeds from Rebecca that du Maurier was able to lease Menabilly in 1943, so that she could move into the place that had provided her with such inspiration. She could never fully possess the house - it had been entailed to the Rashleigh family for 800 years, and still continues to be - but it possessed her, almost as if it were an elusive lover. By 1957, du Maurier had written two more novels set in Menabilly - The King's General, based on the history of the house as a Royalist stronghold during the Civil War, and My Cousin Rachel, in which it provided not only the setting, but a key part of the plot, in a story of a woman as enigmatic and compelling as Rebecca. Thus, 20 years after she had written Manderley into life, du Maurier was living in the house at the end of that twisting drive; a haunted, shadowy place hidden from the road and the sea, surrounded by dense woodland and a headland of sheer cliffs and jagged rocks.

Her reclusive reputation was well-established by then - Menabilly was never open to sightseers; its gates remained closed to all but du Maurier's closest family and friends. Yet in July 1957, she was due to hold a party there to celebrate her silver wedding anniversary with her husband, who was by then a lieutenant general, honoured with a knighthood and a senior position at Buckingham Palace as treasurer to the Duke of Edinburgh. Sir Frederick Browning - known to his military colleagues as 'Boy' and to his family as 'Tommy' - was a charismatic and dashing man; as handsome and patrician as Lawrence Olivier's screen portrayal of the hero of Rebecca, Maxim de Winter. And the story of his and Daphne's engagement is as romantic as any of her novels; indeed, it was brought about by her first book, The Loving Spirit, a fictionalised account of a Cornish boat-building family, written by du Maurier soon after her father bought a holiday house overlooking the Fowey estuary in the 1920s.

Tommy Browning was 34, a decade older than Daphne, when he sailed to Fowey in 1931, on leave from his regiment, a journey he was inspired to make after reading The Loving Spirit. The two did not meet, though Daphne and her elder sister, Angela, spotted the attractive-looking Army major on his boat, Ygdrasil. The following spring, Tommy returned to Fowey, still in search of the girl who had written The Loving Spirit. Introductions were made - his father had met her father at the Garrick Club; he had been at Eton with her cousins - and so began a swift courtship. In her diary for 8 April, 1932, du Maurier wrote: 'A fine bright day with a cold wind. In the afternoon I went out with Browning in his boat. It was the most terrific fun, the seas short and jumpy, and he put his boat hard into it, and we got drenched with spray...

'He's the most amazing person to be with, no effort at all, and I feel I've known him for years.' Just over three months later, on 19 July, they were married nearby, at Lanteglos church, and then set off aboard Tommy's boat to the Helford River and Frenchman's Creek, where they spent a honeymoon lapped by the waves. 'We couldn't have chosen anything more beautiful,' wrote du Maurier in her diary. A quarter of a century later, du Maurier and Browning still appeared to be the most loving and charming of couples. She was beautiful, rich and famous, as well as an apparently devoted wife, entertaining Prince Philip when he came to stay at Menabilly, and accompanying Browning to Balmoral when they were invited there by The Queen. Yet just as a du Maurier novel is never quite what it seems - danger is always lurking close to the surface; a kiss can cut like a knife - her marriage to Browning was under threat, and both of them were at breaking point.

It is at this moment in du Maurier's life that I have chosen to begin my novel, Daphne - a book which is itself inspired by the blurring of fiction and reality in her own writing - when she discovered, just over a fortnight before her wedding anniversary, that Browning had suffered a catastrophic mental breakdown. He collapsed in London at the beginning of July 1957, and was hospitalised in a private nursing home near Harley Street, where it quickly became clear that he had been drinking too much, and was suffering from liver damage. Soon afterwards, du Maurier received a phone call from a woman who told her that she and Browning were in love, and that his breakdown had been triggered by the stress of concealing the affair. Du Maurier was terribly shocked by the news, but there was no question in her mind that they should separate, nor that his trusted position at Buckingham Palace be undermined - indeed, she kept the truth from nearly everyone around her, aside from her closest family and two trusted friends, Maureen and Monty Baker-Munton. Everybody else was told that Browning was suffering from nervous exhaustion, and that his blood was going too slowly through his system.

But du Maurier's own sense of guilt and spiralling anxieties became evident when she spoke to Maureen (Browning's personal assistant, whose husband, Monty, a former Spitfire pilot, was as loyal to the du Mauriers as she was). For like Browning - and so many of her fictional personae - du Maurier had her own secrets to hide, including a wartime affair with a married man, Christopher Puxley, and two intense relationships with women, Nell Doubleday (the wife of her American publisher) and Gertrude Lawrence (the actress, who had not only appeared as the romantic lead in du Maurier's play, September Tide, but had previously been one of her father's lovers).

'It was like being faced with a great jigsaw puzzle,' du Maurier wrote to Maureen, in a long and anguished letter soon after Browning's breakdown, in which she reported her attempts to confess her own infidelities to her husband: '[I said to him] how to blame I had been for so much of his unhappiness during the past years, and came clean about the Puxley man, and then tried to explain in easy language for him to grasp how my obsessions - you can only call them that - for poor old Ellen D. and Gertrude were all part of a nervous breakdown going on inside myself, partly to do with my muddled troubles, and writing, and a fear of facing reality.' But what was the reality that du Maurier feared facing? This is a question I have attempted to address in my novel - and the choice of fiction to explore the mysteries of her past is in part an acknowledgement that one can never know the entire truth of another's life. There has been a much speculation about her bisexuality (a subject thoroughly covered in Margaret Forster's perceptive 1993 biography).

It seems, however, that the intricate ambiguities of her love life (or lives) only begin to make sense when one considers the complexities of her relationship with her father, Sir Gerald du Maurier; for while there has never been conclusive proof that he expressed explicitly incestuous desire for his daughter, his extreme possessiveness veered towards the inappropriate. Thus when du Maurier announced, at the age of 25, that she and Browning were to be married, her father is said to have burst into tears and cried, 'It's not fair!' He died less than two years afterwards, at the age of 61, though not before he had read du Maurier's novel The Progress of Julius, published in the year after her marriage, which describes a father who drowns his 25-year-old daughter because he cannot bear the prospect of her involvement with another man. Du Maurier's description of his incestuous feelings was remarkably open in a novel of that period - Julius's wife is shocked by his 'voracious passion' for their adolescent daughter, and when he watches her playing the flute, he is himself aware of 'an odd taste in his mouth, and a sensation in mind and body that was shameful and unclean'.

(According to du Maurier's son, Kits Browning, 'It's a fascinating story, with an awful lot based on Daphne's father. Julius is utterly ruthless, but he has a magnetism and charm.') She was the second of Gerald's three daughters, and his favourite, growing up in a sophisticated London household, the adored child of a celebrated actor who ran his own successful troupe at Wyndham's Theatre. From the start, it might have been difficult for du Maurier to face reality - or at least, to know where fantasy took over from the truth, for hers was a family imbued with theatricality and high drama. Her parents' romance began on stage - her mother, Muriel, was a pretty young actress when she was cast opposite Gerald as the romantic lead in J.M. Barrie's play The Admirable Crichton, and Barrie went on to write a number of other plays and stories for du Maurier's family: most famously, Peter Pan, which was inspired by her cousins, the five Llewellyn Davies boys, and starred Gerald as a menacing double-act of Captain Hook and Mr Darling.

The du Mauriers formed a tight-knit group, with family nicknames and code words: 'menacing', for example, was slang for sexual attraction, which provides an intriguing context to du Maurier's own, sinister stories, where sex and murder often go hand in hand, and desire can lead to death by drowning. It therefore makes a certain sort of warped sense that at 14, on a family holiday beside the sea in Devon, she fell in love with her father's friend and nephew, her handsome cousin, Geoffrey, also an actor, and at 36 far closer in age to Gerald than Daphne. He was already married to his second wife by then, but appears to have enjoyed the illicit flirtation with his adolescent cousin.

'As the August holiday progressed so did the understanding, and this was something that must not be told to others,' wrote du Maurier, nearly six decades later, '…and after lunch, when we all lay out on the lawn like corpses to catch the sun, rugs over our knees, Geoffrey would come and lie beside me, and feel for my hand under the rug and hold it…' Later, the hand holding progressed to passionate kisses, when Geoffrey came to stay at the du Maurier family home, Cannon Hall in Hampstead, while his wife was convalescing in a nursing home. Du Maurier wrote in her diary at the time, 'When the others go to bed I let him kiss me in the drawing-room… It seems so natural to kiss him now… The strange thing is it's so like kissing D[addy]. There is hardly any difference between them. Perhaps this family is the same as the Borgias. D[addy] is Pope Alexander, Geoffrey is Cesare, and I am Lucretia. A sort of incest.' Marrying Browning was, perhaps, du Maurier's way of escaping the confusion of these relationships.

He was upright, honourable and courageous - he had been awarded a DSO for bravery during the First World War - and a commander of men in a milieu very different from her father's. A quarter of a century later, however, unsettling similarities between Gerald and Browning had surfaced: both drank too much, both had affairs and suffered from debilitating bouts of black depression, despite the polished demeanour they presented to the outside world. But even more disturbing to du Maurier were her mounting fears that her husband might mirror Maxim de Winter (a character who also bears some resemblance to her father; especially in Lawrence Olivier's portrayal of him in the film version of Rebecca).

'I don't want to resurrect Rebecca,' she wrote to Maureen Baker-Munton in July 1957, yet seemed to be doing exactly that, suggesting in the same letter that her husband could, 'in a blind rage, shoot me as Maxim shot Rebecca, and put my body in Yggie [Browning's boat], and take Yggie out to sea, and then the old tragedy be re-enacted, and when he married, as he would in time [the second wife would] be haunted by my ghost… The evil in us comes to the surface.' And if Browning was de Winter, then was it Rebecca's face that she saw when she looked in the mirror at night, or did the ghost of Rebecca walk beside her, down the long corridors of Menabilly? These were the unquiet thoughts that haunted Daphne du Maurier, as she awaited her husband's return from hospital; this was the breaking point that she had reached, alone in her house of secrets, behind a locked iron gate, surrounded by woods where the leaves whispered like voices, and beyond the trees were the beckoning waves. What happened next would take an entire book to unfold in full - a novel that I have therefore written...

'Daphne' by Justine Picardie (Bloomsbury) is available for £12.99 plus £1.25 p&p from Telegraph Books, 0870 428 4115; Justine Picardie will be in conversation with Professor Helen Taylor at Exeter University, home of the Daphne du Maurier archive, on Wednesday, 5 March, 5pm. Earlier in the afternoon, she will give a talk at the archive (01392 263879; email: libspc@exeter.ac.uk ) Rebecca (film) - Wikiquote Rebecca (film) Judith Anderson and Joan Fontaine in Rebecca Rebecca is a 1940 film about a naive young woman who marries a rich widower, moving to his gigantic mansion, where she finds the memory of the first wife maintaining a grip on her husband and the servants. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock . Written by Robert E. Sherwood and Joan Harrison , based on the novel by Daphne du Maurier . The shadow of this woman darkened their love. 8 External links 2nd Mrs.

de Winter[ edit ] Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter, for the way was barred to me. Then, like all dreamers, I was possessed of a sudden with supernatural powers and passed like a spirit through the barrier before me. The drive wound away in front of me, twisting and turning as it had always done. But as I advanced, I was aware that a change had come upon it. Nature had come into her own again and little by little had encroached upon the drive with long tenacious fingers, on and on the poor thread that had once been our drive. And finally, there was Manderley, Manderley, secretive and silent. Time could not mar the perfect symmetry of those walls. Moonlight can play odd tricks upon the fancy, and suddenly it seemed to me that light came from the windows. And then a cloud came upon the moon and hovered an instant like a dark hand before a face. The illusion went with it. I looked upon a desolate shell, with no whisper of a past about its staring walls. We can never go back to Manderley again.

Maxim de Winter[ edit ] [to the 2nd Mrs. de Winter] Do you remember that cliff where you first saw me in Monte Carlo?... That was where I found out about her... She stood there laughing, her black hair blowing in the wind, and told me all about herself — everything. Things I'll never tell a living soul. I wanted to kill her. It would have been so easy. Remember the precipice? I frightened you, didn't I? You thought I was mad. Perhaps I was. Perhaps I am mad. It wouldn't make for sanity, would it, living with the devil. "I'll make a bargain with you," she said. "You'd look rather foolish trying to divorce me now after four days of marriage. So I'll play the part of a devoted wife, mistress of your precious Manderley. I'll make it the most famous showplace in England, if you like. Then people will visit us and envy us and say we're the luckiest, happiest, couple in the country. What a grand show it will be! What a triumph!" I should never have accepted her dirty bargain, but I did. [to the 2nd Mrs. de Winter] But you.

I can't forget what it has done to you. I was looking at you, thinking of nothing else all through lunch. It's gone forever, that funny, young, lost look that I loved. It won't come back again. i killed that too, when I told you about Rebecca. ...It's gone, in twenty four hours. You are so much older... Mrs. Edythe Van Hopper[ edit ] [to the 2nd Mrs. de Winter] So this is what's been happening during my illness! Tennis lessons, my foot! I suppose I have to hand it to you for a fast worker. How did you manage it? Still waters certainly run deep. Tell me, have you been doing anything you shouldn't?... But you certainly have your work cut out as mistress of Manderley. To be perfectly frank with you, my dear, I can't see you doing it. You haven't the experience. You haven't the faintest idea of what it means to be a great lady. Of course, you know why he's marrying you, don't you? You haven't flattered yourself that he's in love with you?

The fact is that empty house got on his nerves to such an extent, he nearly went off his head. He just couldn't go on living alone... Hmmph, Mrs. de Winter! Goodbye, my dear, and good luck. Mrs. Danvers[ edit ] [to the 2nd Mrs. de Winter] Why don't you go? Why don't you leave Manderley? He doesn't need you. He's got his memories. He doesn't love you. He wants to be alone again with her. You've nothing to stay for. You've nothing to live for really, have you? Look down there. It's easy, isn't it? Why don't you? Why don't you? Go on. Go on. Don't be afraid! Dialogue[ edit ] 2nd Mrs. de Winter: You know, I, I wish there could be an invention that bottled up a memory like perfume and it never faded, never got stale. Then, whenever I wanted to, I could uncork the bottle and, and live the memory all over again. Maxim de Winter: And what particular moment in your young life would you want to keep? 2nd Mrs. de Winter: Oh, all of them.

All these last few days. I, I feel as though I've, I've collected a whole shelf full of bottles. Maxim de Winter: Sometimes, you know, those little bottles contain demons that have a way of popping out at you just as you're trying most desperately to forget. 2nd Mrs. de Winter: Our marriage is a success, isn't it? A great success? We're happy, aren't we? Terribly happy? If you don't think we are happy, it would be much better if you didn't pretend. I'll go away. Why don't you answer me? Maxim de Winter: How can I answer you when I don't know the answer myself? If you say we're happy, let's leave it at that. Happiness is something I know nothing about. Mrs. Danvers: You wouldn't think she'd been gone so long, would you? Sometimes, when I walk along the corridor, I fancy I hear her just behind me, that quick, light step. I couldn't mistake it anywhere, not only in this room, but in all the rooms in the house. I can almost hear it now. Do you think the dead come back and watch the living? 2nd Mrs.

de Winter: I don't believe it. Mrs. Danvers: Sometimes I wonder if she doesn't come back here to Manderley to watch you and Mr. de Winter together. You look tired. Why don't you stay here and rest, and listen to the sea? It's so soothing. Listen to it. Listen. 2nd Mrs. de Winter: Why do you hate me? What have I done to you that you should ever hate me so? Mrs. Danvers: You tried to take her place. You let him marry you. I've seen his face, his eyes. They're the same as those first weeks after she died. I used to listen to him, walking up and down, up and down, all night long, night after night, thinking of her. Suffering torture because he lost her. 2nd Mrs. de Winter: I don't want to know. I don't want to know. Mrs. Danvers: You thought you could be Mrs. de Winter, live in her house, walk in her steps, take the things that were hers. But she's too strong for you. You can't fight her. No one ever got the better of her. Never. Never.

She was beaten in the end, but it wasn't a man. It wasn't a woman. It was the sea. Mrs. de Winter: Maxim, can't we start all over again? I don't ask that you should love me. I won't ask impossible things. I'll be your friend, your companion. I'll be happy with that. Maxim de Winter: You love me very much, don't you? But it's too late, my darling. We've lost our little chance at happiness. 2nd Mrs. de Winter: No, Maxim, no. Maxim de Winter: Yes. It's all over now. The thing has happened, the thing I've dreaded, day after day, night after night. 2nd Mrs. de Winter: Maxim, what are you trying to tell me? Maxim de Winter: Rebecca has won. Her shadow has been between us all the time, keeping us from one another. She knew that this would happen. 2nd Mrs. de Winter: How could we be close when I knew you were always thinking of Rebecca? How could I even ask you to love me when I knew you loved Rebecca still? Maxim de Winter: What are you talking about? What do you mean?

2nd Mrs. de Winter: Whenever you touched me, I knew you were comparing me with Rebecca. Whenever you looked at me or spoke to me, or walked with me in the garden, I knew you were thinking, "This I did with Rebecca, and this, and this." It's true, isn't it? Maxim de Winter: You thought I loved Rebecca? You thought that? I hated her! Oh, I was carried away by her, enchanted by her, as everyone was. And when I was married, I was told that I was the luckiest man in the world. She was so lovely, so accomplished, so amusing. "She's got the three things that really matter in a wife," everyone said: "breeding, brains, and beauty." And I believed them, completely. But I never had a moment's happiness with her. She was incapable of love or tenderness or decency. The shadow of this woman darkened their love. The most glamorous woman of all time! A lonely man, a lovely girl... struggling against the secret of Manderley The shadow of a remembered woman came between their lips... but these two had the courage to hope... and to live their love!

The Daphne du Maurier WEB Site - Dame Daphne du Maurier GENRE: Romantic Thriller RATING: NR "Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderley again..." From the first classic line of this unforgettable film, Rebecca casts its spell. David O. Selznick brought Alfred Hitchcock to the United States in order to give this adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's novel the proper atmosphere. The resulting film is a stunning marriage of their sensibilities. It paid off critically and financially as well. Like Gone with the Wind, which Selznick released a year earlier, Rebecca won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Laurence Olivier stars as Maxim de Winter, who, reeling from the recent and unexpected death of his glamorous wife Rebecca, impulsively marries a young and adoring governess (Joan Fontaine). The new Mrs. de Winter tries to fit into her role as mistress of the great house Manderley, but every step she takes is haunted by Rebecca's spirit. The ghost's brooding presence is personified by the insanely meticulous Mrs. Danvers, brilliantly portrayed by Judith Anderson.

As Fontaine's character begins to uncover the dark secrets of the de Winter clan, the house seems to take on a life of its own. Passionate love and romance blend seamlessly with typically Hitchcockian emphases on guilt, sexuality, and gothic horror. The production values are stunning and the cast is excellent, down to the least of the supporting players. While Rebecca has enough surprises to captivate even the most jaded of moviegoers, it is also one of those rare films that improves with each viewing. It is an ageless, timeless adult movie. In today's films, most twists and surprises are ridiculous or just gratuitous, so it's sobering to look back on this film where every revelation not only shocks, but makes organic sense with the story line. Laurence Olivier is dashing and weak, fierce and cowed. Joan Fontaine is strong yet submissive, defiant yet accommodating. There isn't a false moment or misstep, but the film must have killed the employment outlook of any women named Danvers for about 20 years. Brilliant stuff. CAST: Laurence Olivier as George 'Maxim' de Winter Joan Fontaine as The Second Mrs. de Winter George Sanders as Jack Favell Judith Anderson as Mrs.

Danvers Gladys Cooper as Beatrice Lacy Nigel Bruce as Major Giles Lacy Reginald Denny as Frank Crawley C. Aubrey Smith as Colonel Julyan Melville Cooper as Coroner Florence Bates as Mrs. Edythe Van Hopper Leonard Carey as Ben Leo G. Carroll as Dr. Baker DIRECTOR: Alfred Hitchcock WRITERS: Daphne Du Maurier, Philip MacDonald, Michael Hogan, Robert E. Sherwood and Joan Harrison COMPANY: Selznick International Pictures AWARDS: OSCARS - Won for Best Picture and Best Cinematography - Black and White. Also nominated for Best Director, Best Actor (Olivier), Best Actress (Fontaine), Best Supporting Actress (Anderson), Best Screenplay, Best Film Editing, Best Original Musical Score, Best Special Effects and Best Art Direction/Set Decoration - Black and White FOOTNOTES: ...Laurence Olivier was insisting that his girlfriend at the time, Vivien Leigh, be cast as the second Mrs. de Winter. She was tested for the part, along with 20 other actresses, and then-newcomer Joan Fontaine was awarded the part.

...Anne Baxter was one of those who tested, and while she did not get this role, Hitchcock used her in I Confess in 1953. ...Miffed at the rejection of Leigh, he was less than polite to his assigned co-star. At one point, he told director Alfred Hitchcock, "Fontaine's horrible, old boy." Hitchcock told Fontaine that everyone on the set hated to see her get the role, making her completely uneasy and shy - precisely the characteristics he wanted to see from Mrs. de Winter. The cruel hoax got the actress an Oscar nomination. ...Author Du Maurier gave Mrs. de Winter no first name in the novel, and none was assigned to her for the film. ...The only Hitchcock film to ever win a Best Picture Oscar. ...Hitchcock's patented cameo appearance occurs at the end of the film as he walks past a phone booth where George Sanders has just made a call. QUOTES: Maxim de Winter: I'm asking you to marry me, you little fool. REBECCA by Daphne Du Maurier "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. .

." With these words the reader is ushered into an isolated gray stone mansion on the windswept Cornish coast, as the second Mrs. Maxim de Winter recalls the chilling events that transpired as she began her new life as the young bride of a husband she barely knew. For in every corner of every room in the immense, foreboding estate were phantoms of a time dead but not forgotten - a past devotedly preserved by the sinister housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers: a suite immaculate and untouched, clothing laid out and ready to be worn, but not by any of the great house's current occupants. And with an eerie presentiment of evil tightening her heart, the second Mrs. de Winter walked in the shadow of her mysterious predecessor, determined to uncover the darkest secrets and shattering truths about Maxim's first wife - the late and hauntingly beautiful Rebecca. In Association with ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again': A reading challenge - Virago Virago ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again’: A reading challenge Categories: Uncategorised This month marks the 75th anniversary of the first publication of Daphne du Maurier’s masterpiece, Rebecca .

The novel, which has one of the most famous opening lines in literature, is a favourite of many readers, including literary agent Rowan Lawton. Rowan has set herself the challenge of reading all of du Maurier’s fiction, and will be blogging about her experience on the Virago website. Rebecca has remained my favourite novel since my first reading of it, aged thirteen. It’s not my favourite because I think it the finest example of twentieth- century literature I’ve read – though I do think both the literary merit of Rebecca , and Daphne du Maurier’s historical reputation, are hugely underrated. Instead it’s my favourite for three reasons: Number one is Manderley. The house is a character in the novel in a way that hasn’t been matched for me to date; the second reason is the sheer page-turning quality of the writing. Du Maurier had such a skill for creating and building tension; the third is for reasons of nostalgia. Rebecca is a book that stands out in my mind as one of the most intensely enjoyable reading experiences I have ever had. In fact, that first reading (a hardback edition which was a thirteenth birthday present, see photo) sparked what some might call an obsession with Rebecca .

I still have teenage diaries in which I copied out my favourite passages from the novel in my neatest handwriting. It sparked a love of quotes too: I still keep endless notebooks full of my favourites and all of my books have upturned corners peppered throughout. I wrote my university dissertation on Rebecca – specifically gothic reimaginings of it, looking at the Sally Beauman novel, Rebecca’s Tale, and Mrs de Winter by Susan Hill. I reread my dissertation recently, thinking perhaps I could extract the odd line for this blog but it’s embarrassingly pretentious in only the way student writing can be! For my thirtieth birthday my mum made me something called a ‘made book’ from a beautiful edition of Rebecca (see photo below), full of memories of my love of reading (from old diary passages on why I adored books so much, to letters I made my mum write me as though I were Jo from Little Women!). When it came to naming our newly set-up literary agency last year, Eugenie Furniss and I seriously considered calling it Manderley because of our mutual love of Rebecca and all things du Maurier.

Therefore, when I decided this New Year that I wanted to embark on a reading challenge, it seemed only fitting that it should involve the author of my favourite novel, Rebecca , in some way. Eleven years on from leaving university, I often find myself missing the particular type of intellectual rigour offered by studying. Having said that, the phrase ‘university is wasted on the young’ definitely applied to my student self – I came away with an intimate knowledge of how to have a great social life, rather than of great literature. The older I get, the more I feel I know a little bit about lots of things, but not a lot about any one thing. I also realised that I am someone who is well read by book, rather than by author. So, the idea of embarking on the challenge of getting to know one author’s body of work intimately really appealed. I am also fascinated by Daphne herself and I hope that reading all of her fiction in this way, over the course of just one year, will leave me feeling I know far more of one of Britain’s finest writers. Daphne wrote fifteen novels and numerous collections of short stories and, since January, I have read five novels and two story collections.

Evidently I need to speed up my reading between now and the end of December! It has been a hugely satisfying reading experience so far, though. It is a challenge that has led to a pilgrimage of sorts too. So far, I have been to Fowey – the beautiful Cornish town where Daphne lived for much of her adult life – as well as Tregaminion Chapel, a tiny church surrounded by rolling English hills where I took grainy shots of Menabilly (the house Daphne loved and on which Manderley was supposedly based) and I have been on a sun-soaked walk down to Polridmouth beach for a sighting of the old boat house where Rebecca herself conducted her affair. It has also led, in part, to an invitation to view the Du Maurier archive at Exeter University from the author of Virago’s own The Daphne du Maurier Companion, Helen Taylor. In addition, I have a new social talking point – what author would you choose if you were taking up a similar challenge? It has sparked answers as varied as Wilkie Collins, Jilly Cooper and the full output of Mills & Boon!

I’m sticking with Daphne for now, but who knows what 2014 will hold? You might also like: SparkNotes: Rebecca: Chapters 1-4 Chapters 1-4 page 1 of 2 Summary Rebecca begins with the sentence, "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again." The heroine, dreaming, sees herself as a ghost, flitting through the charred ruins of the once-beautiful mansion Manderley, where she once lived. When she awakes, she resolves not to speak of the dream, for "Manderley was ours no longer. Manderley was no more." The only person to whom she could speak of it, we realize shortly, is her husband, whose name we have not yet learned. Together, the couple is traveling through Europe, staying in small hotels to avoid meeting people they both know. They have recently been through a period of great suffering, connected to the destruction of Manderley, but the heroine does not reveal the nature of their predicament. Pieces of a vanished life float vaguely about: the heroine misses her dog, Jasper, and remembers how meals were prepared at Manderley, and then she thinks of a Mrs.

Danvers, and a man called Favell, and wonders where they are now. Mrs. Danvers, we learn, was always comparing the heroine to someone named Rebecca, but details are not forthcoming. Instead, the heroine's thoughts turn to her younger self, years before, and then the real story begins, told in a flashback. As a young woman, the heroine (whose given name we never learn) travels across Europe as a companion to Mrs. Van Hopper, a wealthy American lady. (It was a common custom in the 19th and early 20th century for wealthy, unmarried older women to pay young girls to travel with them, as both a servant and a friend with whom to converse. During their travels, the two women come to Monte Carlo, a resort city in the south of France. Mrs. Van Hopper, a nosy, gossipy, vulgar woman, recognizes a handsome middle-aged man who is staying in their hotel, and points him out to the heroine. He is Maxim de Winter, the owner of the famous estate known as Manderley, and he is reportedly in mourning for his wife, who died the previous year. Mrs.

Van Hopper invites him to tea, but shows her most vulgar and crude side, to the great embarrassment of the heroine. Maxim treats her coldly, but later that day he sends a note to the heroine, apologizing for his rudeness at tea. The following day, Mrs. Van Hopper is ill, and so the heroine has the day to herself. At lunch she runs into Maxim, who insists on eating with her, and then invites her to drive with him along the beautiful coastline. He shows warm and courteous demeanor--except at one place on the road, a place with a particularly striking view, where a bad memory seems to trouble him. At the end of the drive, the heroine notices a book of poetry in the car, and he insists upon giving it to her. She reads it that night, and notices that it is inscribed, "Max--from Rebecca." Then she recalls what Mrs. Van Hopper said about Maxim's dead wife: her name was Rebecca, and she drowned, accidentally, in a bay near Manderley. Commentary A sense of loss hangs infuses the opening pages of Rebecca.

The narrator and her husband, neither of whose names we know yet, find themselves in exile from Manderley, a place of great beauty that now lies in ruins. But their exile owes not only to the physical destruction of their home; a house can be rebuilt. Rather, their exile is a spiritual one, and one freely chosen, to escape the ghosts that haunt Manderley's ruins. "We can never go back again, that much is certain," the heroine says. "The past is still too close to us. The things we have tried to forget and put behind us would stir again... " Indeed, their exile is not an unhappy one, despite the tinge of regret for what has been lost. "We have come through our crisis," she asserts, and exile is the price they must pay for their triumph over the forces that once oppressed them. The narrative does not supply names for these distressing forces--though it briefly mentions a Mrs. Danvers--but the reader's foreknowledge of Manderley's destruction nevertheless creates a mood of foreboding as the novel's action veers into the flashback, and the meat of the story begins. In the heroine's memory, the scenes shifts to sun-drenched Monte Carlo, where Mrs.

Van Hopper holds sway. We quickly gain insights into the characters presented: the old lady is hardly a nice person, certainly, but her disagreeableness contains no real malice; indeed, her ghastly, gossipy behavior around Maxim, while embarrassing to the heroine, is amusing to the reader, as are Maxim's coldly cutting replies. For his part, this man shows himself to be intelligent, sophisticated, unflappable--more than a match for the Mrs. Van Hoppers of the world. Rebecca is a gothic novel, meaning that it belongs to the same genre as books like Wuthering Heights , Jane Eyre , and even Dracula , in which dark, ominous landscapes and architecture are the setting for violence, fiery passions, and supernatural events. Rebecca's characters, too, fit the gothic pattern: already we see that in Maxim de Winter, the author has created the perfect gothic hero--the broodingly handsome nobleman with a terrible secret. "His face," the heroine relates, "was arresting, sensitive, medieval in some strange inexplicable way...

[C]ould one but rob him of his English tweeds, and put him in black, with lace at his throat and wrists, he would stare down at us in our new world from a long distant past--a past where men walked cloaked at night, and stood in the shadow of old doorways, a past of narrow stairways and dim dungeons, a past of whispers in the dark, of shimmering rapier blades, of silent, exquisite courtesy." He is thus the perfect person to own Manderley, a place where that medieval world of shadows and secrets lives on. 1 Daphne Du maurier - Rebecca - First Edition - Signed | Bauman Rare Books Daphne DU MAURIER Item#: 90245 We're sorry, this item has been sold “LAST NIGHT I DREAMT I WENT TO MANDERLEY AGAIN”: FIRST EDITION OF REBECCA, SIGNED BY DU MAURIER, IN SCARCE DUST JACKET DU MAURIER, Daphne. Rebecca. London: Victor Gollancz, 1938. Octavo, original black cloth gilt, original dust jacket. Housed in a custom clamshell box.

First edition of du Maurier’s most famous novel, her haunting tale of memory and murder, the basis for Alfred Hitchcock’s Oscar-winning 1940 film, in scarce original dust jacket, signed by Du Maurier on a special Book Society bookplate. “‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.’ The opening line of perhaps the greatest romantic suspense novel ever written has become as familiar to readers as ‘Call me Ishmael’ from Moby-Dick” (Penzler, Crown Crime Companion 9). Du Maurier’s most popular novel, and one that paved the way for a renaissance of romantic mystery in mid-20th century publishing, Rebecca “subtly subverts the classic rags-to-riches or Cinderella theme to provide an eerie… almost Gothic narrative” (Parker & Kermode, 211). The novel proved to critics that “Du Maurier is in a class by herself” (New York Times).

For the Oscar-winning adaptation by Hitchcock in 1940, in which “the film like the novel is wonderfully tense,” Hays Office censors “demanded removal of the novel’s heart— the fact that Maxim (Laurence Olivier) has murdered Rebecca— so that he would not go unpunished for a crime” (Tibbetts & Welsh, 347). Reilly, 511. Steinbrunner & Penzler, 136. Hubin I:128. Dark Page I:80. Bookplate of the Book Society, which designated this novel as the Book Society Choice for August. The Book Society additionally commissioned bookplate designs by artists such as Edmund Dulac and Rex Whistler (as here), best known for his book illustrations, advertising posters, and society portraits. Gift inscription. Bookseller ticket. Interior fine, light rubbing to extremities of original cloth. Scarce dust jacket exceptionally nice with a bit of expert restoration. A near-fine signed copy.

ask an Expert shipping & guarantee If you are interested in an item from one of our catalogues or our website and would like more information before ordering it, please give us a call; one of our salespeople will be happy to speak with you and answer any questions that you might have. For some items, we can also email digital photographs. All of our items are guaranteed as described and are shipped on approval. We accept MasterCard, Visa, American Express, Discover, checks and wire transfer. For first-time buyers, we prefer a credit card and we will only ship to the billing address on the card. We do ask that if you are not satisfied with the item, you contact us by phone as quickly as possible and return the item within ten days. We ship worldwide and all packages will be sent via UPS or Federal Express unless another carrier is requested. Next-day or second-day air service is available upon request. Shipping and insurance charges are additional. Author's full list of books DU MAURIER, Daphne > Aquatint Copperplate process by which the plate is “bitten” by exposure to acid.

By changing the areas of the plate that are exposed and the length of time the plate is submerged in the acid bath, the engraver can obtain fine and varying shades of gray that closely resemble watercolor washes. Although the name contains the word “tint”, this is a black-and-white printing process; aquatint plates can often be hand colored, however. Armorial Used to describe a binding bearing the coat of arms of the original owner, or with bookplates incorporating the owner’s arms. Association Copy copy that belonged to someone connected with the author or the contents of a book. Boards Hard front and rear covers of a bound book which are covered in cloth, leather or paper. “Original boards” refers to cardboard-like front and back boards, from about 1700 to 1840, used as temporary protection for books before their purchasers would have them bound. Of particular value to collectors as evidence of a very early form of the book. Book-Plate Label, generally affixed to the front pastedown, identifying a book’s owner.

Broadside Sheet printed on one side, typically for public display, usually larger than folio size (a folio being a broadside-size sheet printed on both sides and folded once, to make four pages). Calf Binding material made from cowhide—versatile, durable, usually tan or brown in color, of smooth texture with no or little apparent grain. Readily marbled (“tree calf”), mottled, diced, colored, polished, tooled in gilt or blind, even scented (known as “russia”). Reverse calf, with a distinctive suede-like texture, is occasionally used. Chromolithograph Lithograph printed in colors, typically three or more. Collation Process by which the contents of a book are inspected for completeness, checking against internal evidence, the table of contents and/or plate list, and reference works. Also a shorthand bibliographical description of a book’s composition by its leaves and signatures, rather than its pages. A-C, for example, would indicate a quarto volume composed of three signatures or gatherings of eight pages each for a total of 24 pages. Colophon Printed note at the end of a text containing information about the printing of the book.

Doublure Pastedowns made not of paper but of leather, for decorative purposes. Duodecimo (12MO) Smaller than an octavo, typically less than six inches tall; smaller formats, such as 24mo and 32mo, are uncommon. Edition Print-run from a single setting of type without substantial change. Depending on demand, any number of printings can be made from a setting of type For example, a first printing might consist of 1000 copies, followed by a second printing of 2500 copies; in which case the book would have a first edition, first printing of 1000 copies, and a first edition, second printing of 2500 copies. Endpapers Extra leaves—plain, colored or decorated—with which a bookbinder covers the insides of the book’s boards, therefore not part of the actual text block. The part of the leaf pasted to the inside of the front board is the front “pastedown,” while the other part of the leaf that forms the first page of the book is the “front free endpaper”; the same applies to the rear pastedown and rear free endpaper.

Engraving Illustration produced by carving lines into a metal plate. This is an intaglio process, in which ink is poured over the plate, then wiped from the surface, leaving ink only in the recesses made by the engraver’s tools. The image is then transferred by pressing thick dampened paper against the metal plate with great force—requiring engravings to be printed on a separate stock and separate press from any text. Errata List of mistakes and corrections noted after printing, often compiled on a separate sheet or slip and inserted into the text block. Flyleaves Additional blank leaves following or preceding the endpapers. Folio Book composed of sheets that are folded once and printed on both sides, making two leaves and four pages. Typically above 14 inches tall. Oblong folios are produced the same way but bound at the short edge, producing a book typically more than 14 inches deep. Fore-Edge Edge of the book furthest from the spine.

Occasionally the text of a book will be put into a specialized book press and painted, often with a scene from the book or a landscape, so that the painting is invisible when the book is closed but visible when somebody bends the text and fans the pages—known as a fore-edge painting. Foxing Light brown spots that naturally appear on some papers due to oxidation as they age. Frontispiece An illustration facing the title page of a book. Gathering Single sheet of paper that has been printed and folded to form the pages required by the book’s format. A single gathering of a quarto book, then, would be a sheet folded twice, containing four leaves, eight pages of text.. Gatherings are identified by a letter, symbol or number in the lower margin of the first page (the “signature”) to make it easy for the printer to stack them in proper order for sewing. Gilt Edges The three exposed edges of a book have been smoothed and gilded. Half Title Leaf preceding the title page that bears the book’s title, originally used to identify the unbound text block. The book’s binder would often remove and discard the half title at the time of binding. Remaining half-titles are therefore of interest to collectors.

Illuminated Decorated by hand. Typically early printed books and especially manuscripts. Imprint Satement of place, publisher and date of publication on a book’s title page. Incunable From the cradle of printing, i.e., any book printed before 1501. Issue A group of books issued by the publisher as a discrete unit. At times, issue refers to timing, such as the “first issue” being offered to the public at an earlier date than the “second issue.” At other times, it refers to specially planned different batches, such as the “trade issue” (widely available) in opposition to a “signed limited issue” (limited to a small amount of copies differing somehow from the trade issue and not widely available). Japanese Vellum Expensive handmade paper often used in deluxe editions. Lithograph Illustration produced by transferring an image drawn on a carefully prepared stone to paper. The process allowed illustrations to more closely resemble the original drawings, paintings or sketches, as it gave the lithographer a freedom of line impossible to achieve in earlier intaglio and relief processes.

It does not require the same sort of pressure as an engraving to transfer the image, but still has to be printed on separate stock from the text Marginalia Handwritten notes made in the margins by a previous owner. Mispaginated Printer’s error in pagination, typically skipping, transposing or repeating page numbers. Not uncommon in older, larger books, it is not considered a defect, so long as all integral leaves are present. Modern Recently accomplished, when used to describe a book’s binding that is not the original casing. Some books bound recently are bound using techniques, tools and styles of the period of the book’s original issue; when done well this is called a period-style binding, a term that implies “modern” as well. Morocco Binding material made from goatskin—versatile, durable, with a distinctive pebbled texture and visible grain. Readily stretched (“straight-grain”), crushed (flattened smooth), tooled in gilt or blind, inlaid with leathers of different colors. So-called because much of the raw material originally came from the tanneries of North Africa (other types of goatskin bindings denoting regions of origin include levant, turkey, niger).

Offset The unintended transfer of ink from one printed page to an adjacent page. Period-Style binding executed with materials, tools and techniques to approximate the look of a contemporary binding from the period of the book’s publication. The term implies that the binding is modern, or recent, unless otherwise specified. Plate Full-page illustration printed separately from but bound with the text. Point Variation in text, illustration, design or format that allows a bibliographer to distinguish between different editions and different printings of the same edition, or between different states or issues of the same printing. Presentation Copy Book given as a gift by its author, illustrator or publisher. Sometimes refers to a volume given by a notable donor. Provenance History of a particular copy of a book. Raised Bands Horizontal protruding strips found on the spine of a book. Reback To supply a worn binding with a new spine, usually made of the same material as the rest of the binding and decorated to match. When feasible the binder may preserve the original spine and affix it to the new material, described as “rebacked with the original spine laid down.” Recase To reattach a text block to its binding when it has become loose from its covers. Recto The front side of a leaf.

The back side is known as the “verso.” Trade Edition Printing or printings of a book made available for purchase by the general public on publication day (as opposed to a limited edition, often available only by subscription). Uncut When the edges of the text block (most apparent at the fore and lower edges) have not been trimmed to a uniform size, and are therefore characterized by a ragged or deckle edge. A book may be uncut but opened—i.e., with a paper-knife—but all unopened books (see below) are by nature uncut as well. Unopened When the folds of the sheets of paper making up the text block have not been trimmed away or opened with a paper-knife. While this makes it impossible to read all of the pages, it also indicates a probability that the text block has not been altered since leaving the printer. Vellum Binding material made from specially treated calfskin—durable, with a distinctive ivory color and smooth appearance. Can be tooled in gilt or blind. So-called Japan vellum (or Japon) is a type of thick paper that has been polished smooth and given a glossy finish to resemble vellum.

Verso The back or reverse side of a leaf or page. (See “recto.”) Woodcut Illustration or textual decoration made by cutting away from the surface of a block of wood until the reverse of the image is left in relief; this is then inked and pressed to the paper to leave the image. The woodblock, or multiple blocks, can be fit into the page along with the type, allowing text and illustrations to be printed in the same print run and share the same page (not possible with engravings, which require thicker, damp paper and much more force; nor with lithographs, which require a different printing process altogether). Woodcuts preceded moveable type and are the earliest known printing technology. Wood-Engraving Engraving made with the graver or burin on the cross-section of a piece of boxwood; the harder wood and finer tools allow for more delicate, finely detailed images, while the block can still be set in the page alongside text and printed on the same stock as the text. While much older, wood engravings enjoyed an important renaissance in the late eighteenth century through Thomas Bewick and continued in popularity thorugh the nineteenth century.

Wormhole Tiny pinhole-sized trails left by bookworms as they eat through a text block. Much more common in older books printed on handmade papers with a high rag content than in books printed on manufactured papers made from wood pulp with a higher acidic content. Wrappers Paper coverings—plain, marbled or printed—attached by stitches, staples or glue to a text block to identify it and afford it some protection (though much more fragile than a binding in plain, cloth or leather-covered boards). More typical of slim and/or inexpensive volumes such as pamphlets. “Self wrappers” are leaves, blank or printed, that are integral to the text block, conjugate with other leaves and from the same stock. “Original wrappers,” those attached at the time of issue, are scarce and extremely desirable to most collectors. Receive Electronic Catalogues Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley... on the No. 25: Vandalised bus stop is given Daphne du Maurier-style makeover by creative villagers | Daily Mail Online Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley... on the No.

25: Vandalised bus stop is given Daphne du Maurier-style makeover by creative villagers comments From large cities to small villages, bus stops are often neglected and scruffy places, attracting anti-social behaviour. But as these pictures show, the residents in one Cornish village decided to reclaim their bus stop from local yobs and transformed it into a place to be proud of. The bus stop in Fowey, Cornwall, was first given a make-over in 2006 by Jane Tinsley and every year since it is re-painted and furnished to take on a different theme. Attractive: Despite bus stops in many towns and cities being neglected and scruffy, residents in one Cornish village decided to reclaim their bus stop from local yobs and transformed it into a place to be proud of Impressive: The bus stop in Fowey, Cornwall, was first given a make-over in 2006 by Jane Tinsley and every year since it is re-painted and furnished to take on a different theme This year it has a boutique feel and is themed on the famous English author Daphne du Maurier and her classic book Rebecca.

The bus shelter includes the book's famous opening line: 'Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again'. Those waiting for a bus can wait comfortably in one of the armchairs and relax while reading a book or magazine. RELATED ARTICLES Share this article Share Before Mrs Tinsley got to grips with the bus stop near her home it was drab and dilapidated and was often attacked by vandals. Over the years it has had a number of different themes, including once being given a Moroccan-style makeover which came complete with armchairs, cushions and floral wall designs. The creative 47-year-old transformed the drab bus shelter into a lavish Moroccan retreat with terracotta paint and interior furnishings. Pleasant: This year it has a boutique feel and is themed on the famous English author Daphne du Maurier Relaxing: Those waiting for a bus can wait comfortably in one of the armchairs while reading a book or magazine Speaking previously, the mum-of-three said: 'It was scruffy and horrible and the seat was broken and it is one of the first things people see when they arrive here.

'All the bits of furniture and paintings have been donated by lots of different people who all wanted to see the bus stop improved. 'We had plastic chairs at first but now they have been replaced by better quality wooden ones that people no longer needed in their homes.' She even made a curtain for the window and added a rocking chair, waste-paper basket and a selection of neatly pruned pot-plants. Different: The bus stop has previously had a Moroccan and eastern feel Nice: The drab bus shelter was transformed into a lavish Moroccan retreat with terracotta paint and interior furnishings She was also given permission to spruce up the small stone shelter by the town council after it suffered years of vandalism. Councillor Sally Bain said: 'She's made it so attractive. In the early stages there was some vandalism but now it seems to survive. 'I think it's rather lovely and it's very popular in Fowey.' The bus stop has featured in a book 'The Best Bus Stop in the U.K' and features in local postcards. Achievement: The bus stop has featured in a book 'The Best Bus Stop in the U.K' and features in local postcards

Question: """Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again,"" was the first line of what Daphne du Maurier novel?"
Answer: Rebecca